It was the strangest and the best compliment she’d ever received. Katherine knew that she was not beautiful, though she suspected she had been, once. Now her face was bloated and scarred from acne, and the Florida sun had bleached her hair in a way she felt made her resemble a pumpkin. For a second she wondered if Blake was making fun of her. But the way he kept his pale gaze fixed on her suggested otherwise.
His eyes were an intense blue. Cracked out, Rachelle called them, but Katherine liked them. She had never seen a boy with eyes that pretty.
Everyone gossiped at Paradise Lake, because despite the swimming pool and the tennis court and the infinite supply of arts and crafts, there was really nothing better to do. That’s how Katherine found out that Blake had murdered someone.
Carmen told her, a week before Katherine left. She must have let it slip somehow that she liked Blake—by looking at him too much, or laughing at one of his jokes, and Carmen noticed.
“Don’t you know what he did?” she asked Katherine, as they stood in line for dessert, which was brownie bites, unnecessarily arranged in the shape of a heart.
“Nope,” said Katherine, not looking at Carmen, not wanting to give her the satisfaction.
“Do you want to know? Maybe you don’t. It’s pretty bad.”
“Either tell me or don’t tell me.”
“He killed his girlfriend. He took her into the woods and slit her throat,” Carmen said, miming the action, just in case Katherine didn’t get it. Carmen still had rich-girl hair, which fell in soft gold waves across her shoulders, but her teeth were rotten. “Just fucking left her there to die. Took them two days to find her.”
Katherine had a million questions. Internet access was strictly forbidden at Paradise Lake, which meant she was going to have to rely on Carmen for answers.
“Two days?” she said, stupidly, as if that were the most interesting part of the information.
“Yup.” Carmen frowned. She had probably been expecting a more extreme reaction.
“That’s fucked up,” Katherine said, evenly.
“Yup. It really is. Do you have any cigarettes?”
Paradise Lake’s official motto was A Place for Healing. Its real motto was Hurt people hurt people. Katherine wondered where the hurt came from in the first place. She imagined it pooled at the center of the earth, like oil.
During yoga, Katherine decided to find out if Jimmy, who shared a cabin with Blake, knew anything.
“Do you know why he’s here?” she asked, as they did downward dog.
“Depression, he said,” answered Jimmy. He turned his face, red with effort, toward her. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. Carmen said he killed someone.”
“Really? No shit.” Jimmy seemed a little impressed.
“She could be making it up.”
“Carmen does love lying,” Jimmy acknowledged. “But it would kind of make sense. Maybe he did that, felt super guilty, so he tried to off himself, and now he’s here.”
You would know about feeling super guilty, Katherine was tempted to say. But instead she exhaled and moved into cat pose.
The worst part of rehab, next to all the rules, was that people said stupid shit all the time, and you weren’t allowed to make fun of them. It made her worry that she herself was going to start saying stupid shit, and wouldn’t even realize it, because no one would tell her. It was nerve-racking. In evening group, a middle-aged former crackhead named Billy said, in total seriousness, “I’m interested in interesting things. Like neuroscience, and how the moon looks like a face.”
Everyone had nodded and murmured their assent, and Katherine wanted to scream. She had been there for five months, and she had three days left.
After group, she declined Lucy’s invitation to arts and crafts hour, and instead walked to the pool. No one ever swam in it, because no one ever cleaned it, because there was no need to, because no one ever swam in it. It was a ten-by-twenty-foot representation of human folly, coated in algae.
Katherine hitched up her skirt and stuck her feet in the water. It was gross, but it still felt good. She sat there for a while, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring at the stars, trying not to despair.
“Hello,” said Blake, startling her.
“Hi.” Katherine glanced around. It was rare for male clients and female clients to be left alone together, even in a setting as profoundly unsexy as this one. Usually a staff member would intervene. Maybe everyone was busy. Or maybe, because Katherine was leaving so soon, they had given up on her. They had to prioritize, after all. Blake sat down next to her, cross-legged.
“I had a dream about you, Katie. You had wings. But they were bird-sized. Like, small. In the middle of your back. You couldn’t fly but you kept showing them off.”
Katherine felt a shiver of pleasure down her back, right in the location of her dream-wings. She swirled her feet around in the water, examining the ripples.
“What color were they?”
“Green.”
“Like a parrot’s?”
“I guess.”
“That’s good. Could be gross little gray pigeon wings.”
Thanks to the new cocktail of medications from her Paradise Lake psychiatrists, Katherine no longer remembered her dreams, which she was glad of, because if she did, she would have to tell Arthur about them. Those doctors knew what they were doing, even if you did have to wonder how they ended up in the middle of Florida, ministering to junkies.
She watched Blake take off his shoes and roll up the hems of his jeans, and felt another shiver. It had been three months since she’d been touched by anyone, except to shake hands with Arthur at the beginning of each session. It wasn’t natural, she thought. It was enough to drive a person crazy, even under the best of circumstances. When she was out of there, she would write Paradise Lake a letter, telling them so.
“Did you ever try that?” he asked, gesturing to the crowd of people on horses in the distance.
“Equine therapy?”
“No, escaping on horseback.”
Katherine laughed. “No. I don’t like horses. They’re huge, and they smell like their own shit.”
“True,” he said. “Good thing that they’re vegetarians, right?”
“What?”
“Like, if they ate meat? That would be really scary.”
“Oh shit. I never even thought of that! Shit. That’s fucked up.”
They both laughed.
“Did you really kill your girlfriend?” she asked, trying to use a light, flirtatious tone of voice, but she was out of practice. It came out silly, high-pitched, and she cringed at the sound of it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really. I was on acid. I had some kind of a psychotic episode. It was like I was someone else, watching someone do this terrible thing. I closed my eyes, so that I wouldn’t have to see it. And then when I opened them again, I was in a jail cell.”
He did not seem angry, or even offended, which is what Katherine had expected. He didn’t sound particularly remorseful, either.
“What was she like?”
“Lovely. Very clever, very sweet. She was a brilliant painter. You would have liked her. Everyone did.” He said this without any discernible emotion, not meeting Katherine’s gaze. She shifted, trying to keep her face still. After all, how was one supposed to talk about a girl they’d stabbed to death?